Fishing debris cleanup under way in the bay

Spring is the time for cleaning and many Cape towns stage litter pick-up days. The Center for Coastal Studies is doing the same for Cape Cod Bay.

“We do it periodically. The last time was in 2014,” said Laura Ludwig, Director of the Marine Debris Program. “It’s all completely dependent on grant funds and we were able to secure federal funding this year. There has been a survey in Massachusetts and on average 5 to 15 percent of lobster traps are lost annually. That’s 80,0000 to 100,000 including Maine.”

Lost lobsters traps, engaging in ghost fishing, are a prime focus for Ludwig. They’re lost when storms detach the buoys or draggers or scallopers catch them and carry them away.

“Some gear we recover off Provincetown comes from clear across the Bay,” Ludwig noted. “So far we’ve gotten 100 traps this week and we started Sunday (she said on Tuesday). A lot is from non-commercial or recreational lobstering. Anyone can get a license for 10 lobster pots. So there is an effort to educate people with a 10-pot license what the risks are.”

All in all it’s the third or fourth Cape Cod Bay cleanup and Provincetown’s harbormaster did it once as well. This year’s grant came from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Debris Program.

In addition to lobster traps, Ludwig and her team find ropes, nets and other flotsam.

“I’ve been doing this a long time,” Ludwig said. “I used to do it in Maine, probably the first year was 2009. And now that I’m at the Center for Coastal Studies we have some amazing side scan radar equipment and that has enhanced the recovery effort.”

A side scan radar sounds like something out of World War II, as indeed it is. Actually it was developed just after the war but by one of the German scientists imported into the U.S. at the beginning of the Cold War. While the initial applications were military by the 1980s it was being used to hunt shipwrecks and later on was used in commercial fish finders.

“It’s basically equipment that’s mounted and towed from a boat and it gives a sonic image of the ocean floor,” Ludwig explained. “So it is sound based, (like sonar), and you get a picture of the bottom. It’s used in search and rescue operations. It’s a pretty sophisticated unit.”

The searchers can determine the type of substrate -- sand, mud, rocks -- and the lobster traps will show up as squares.

“It does take some experience,” Ludwig explained. “But we do see a lot of lobster gear and we get into other things like steel cable, monofilament gillnets, nylon nets but those are not our targets. Our targets are lobster traps. We’re looking at the issue of bycatch. And we often find things, once we remove the traps that are entanglement points for whales.”

While "ghost fishing" is an issue it may not be nearly the problem it is with drifting fishnets. Are the animals found within using the trap as shelter or habitat or have they been caught? Certainly lobsters can get caught if they leave the ‘kitchen’ wander through the funnel and get stuck in the ‘parlor’, but crabs and fish might drop in and out.

“A lot of the traps have living creatures in them and we look at the age of the trap and what’s living in it and we look whether they’re using it as habitat or are in it because the escape hasn’t opened,” Ludwig said. “It’s an ongoing project and we have a good aggregation of data on the age of the traps, the number of critters and whether the escape panels function.”

Inside the traps Ludwig finds large “bigger than a fist” mussels, various types of sea growth such as sea squirts, hydroids and algae, assorted crab species, fish like cunners, echinoderms (starfish), sea worms, and on Tuesday, a sea cucumber.

“We’re trying to figure out with this gear, is there so much growth, is it better to just leave it where it is?” Ludwig asked.

One thing they have found is that the traps can bait themselves when the bait voluntarily strolls in luring lobsters behind it.

“That’s a cyclical thing that can go on and on until a trap gets buried or gets a hole in it,” Ludwig said. “It’s pretty complex but we can use that information to argue for different modifications in the build. We work closely with the DMF (Division of Marine Fisheries) and Environmental Police and we work with lobstermen and divers.”

The Center doesn’t have time to sonar scan the whole bay but fishermen tip them off as to where the lost trap hot spots might be. Provincetown, off Sesuit Harbor (Dennis), Sandwich and Chatham are such locales. Those are all areas with a lot of traffic and traps, where lines can get entangled as the boats motor through.

“Those are known areas of conflicts,” Ludwig said. “So far we’ve surveyed over 1,000 acres. We’ll be in anywhere from 40 to 150 feet of water. We only dive for the shallower targets. We don’t send divers below 75 feet, deeper than that we use the grapple to recover. Technologically this hasn’t been done at this level. Using sonar is much more efficient than (just) grappling efforts. ”

Lobster gear is more regulated than it used to be and the ropes are supposed to sink to the bottom if they come loose to avoid entanglements. But sometimes traps are still left out all winter, if fishermen can’t get out during storms. Ludwig said she’s seen buoys this week, four months after the traps should’ve been cleared prior to the season reopening May 1.

If they can ID the owner they will return the traps otherwise they are auctioned off or recycled. Nauset Disposal has donated containers to collect and haul away the traps. In all their efforts the Center has recovered 16 tons of gear and more than 660 traps.